I enjoy mingle with visionary people. I like their constant flow of great ideas and energy. But more often, when they see me with new ideas, they will ask, “Thomas, I think I have a great idea. Can you help me to develop it?” My standard response to them is usually, “Yes sir, I can.” I will pause momentarily and continue, “But do we really have to develop it?” Most of the time, they will respond to me, “Why not?” Though I know you may feel that this sounds a little vague when I said, “Have you thought of perhaps there are other shortcuts to do it?” My objective is at least trying to get their attention to listen and avoid the common misconception of “build and they will come” experienced by most entrepreneurs. Especially those with the technical skills (like me), we tend to take our capabilities for granted, where it is always seems counterintuitive why we shouldn’t just do it.

I am a strong advocate of using technology (IT to be specific) as an enabler to business model innovation. It’s important to understand that innovation is not limited to technological innovations by high-tech companies, but also includes marketing innovation, management innovation, process innovation, and product innovation. To put it simply, regardless of what business or industry you are in, if you are trying out different way of doing things in your business and not following the conventional wisdom, then you are innovating your business model.

Technology can play a key role in business model innovation, though most people still find it a black art when comes to the proper process of using technology to innovate their business model. Some people use whatever that their peers or competitors are using, which is a bit illogical if you believe your business model is unique (or should be unique) even you are in the same industry as them. Some just evaluate on the features, but they overlook how well the features are sewed together to match the business process they envisioned. What I shared below are short and concise tips that I distill out based on my experience in various projects. I hope that will serve as effective guidelines for you when considering technology in your projects.

I came across this interview that was done by McKinsey with Coop Centrale CEO, Massimo Bongiovanni, as he explained IT’s role in the future of retailing. Cooperative Consumers Coop, better known as Coop, was Italy’s first retailer to embrace hypermarkets, in the 1980s, and then began opening even bigger superstore venues while expanding its offerings to include insurance and banking services, electricity, and prescription drugs. Throughout this expansion, Coop sought innovative ways to support its strategy with technology. The original interview can be found at Mckinsey Quarterly website.

Doing business in today’s rapid change and globalized environment, we no longer can just depend on ordinary business principles. We need to constantly innovate to change the way we do business or face rivals who do so to offer superior value to their customers. Technology is an enabler for business innovation, and it’s probably the most accessible strategy to innovate the way how your business works. It’s a common myth that only large corporations and businesses that sell technologies need to innovate. In fact, in today’s marketplace, whether you are selling printers or flowers, you need to leverage on technology for honing your competitive edge, even more so for small businesses. But the question is: What technology is applicable to you? Which one is the best? Will they create more work and headaches for me?

Most people when they think of starting their own business, earning a lot of money is probably their primary goal. Soon, they will realize that life is more than just money. In fact, the desire of earning big money no longer seems like an effective motivation to push them through their entrepreneurship journey. We often heard a lot of rosy stories from the newspaper or other media that some school dropout youngsters earned their first million dollar after two years of doing some online businesses or other fancy ideas. To be blunt, I think all these are sensational news. Though it does happened in reality, but it probably requires lots of luck. Statistically speaking, the success rate of startups is one out of ten.

After months of hard work, Coconect.com was unveiled on 28 May 2011, launching their premier online services for helping their customers in building thriving customer relationships beyond the business transaction. Their vision was articulated clearly in their tagline, Putting the :) back in business. They had devised an innovative process to help their clients in nurturing sustainable customer relationship. Unlike those CRM software in the market, Coconect’s process was meticulously crafted to focus on the heart of customer relationship management, making sure that their services are smart yet simple, systemized yet flexible; and delivered with a lot of heart and fun!

The construction industry has substantial socio-economic impact, both nationally and internationally. Yet, given the obvious importance of the industry, it is surprising that the general view of the industry is one that is resistant to change, inefficient and lagging behind most industries in terms of technology implementation. This is largely due to the nature of how the industry operates, and the relatively low awareness of technology capability among industry players. With globalization happening at such an immense pace, operational costs on the rise, and increasing demand for more quality and sophisticated buildings, we need better ways of doing business now. As already proven in other industries, technology can help small companies to act “big”, and help big companies to act “small”. Small construction firms can leverage on technologies to acquire some of the capabilities and market access of larger organizations, while large construction firms can use technologies to achieve some of the agility and responsiveness of small organizations.

Due to the factor such as time, manpower and to meet the evolving requirement in software development, it is often not possible to include all the features users might need during the initial release of software. As an extensive software platform, it is imperative to provide a robust infrastructure where the services are always up-to-date and up-to-demand so that user requirements will be met as time goes. Software plug-in is a good mechanism to provide frequent update and encourage user contribution to improve the software. In order to ease the end-users of enhancing the software, a plug-in must be able to implement easily without extensive coding. The small plug-in file can then be downloaded by the users and ‘plug’ into the program to provide extended functionality to the software.